Microsoft this morning published a searchable online list of its patent holdings — more than 40,000 patents held by the company and its subsidiaries in the U.S. and internationally — as part of its push for more transparency in the patent system.

Google announced a “patent pledge” in which it will donate 10 patents related to MapReduce to protect the emerging cloud and big data industry from lawsuits.

The Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge is better than no pledge but not better than no patents. Here is more about it:

Google just announced the Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge, a new initiative whereby the company has promised not to sue developers, distributors, and users of open source software utilizing Mountain View’s patents “unless first attacked.” In introducing the good faith effort, Google is reiterating its passion and support for all things open. “Open-source software has been at the root of many innovations in cloud computing, the mobile web, and the Internet generally,” writes Duane Valz, Google’s senior patent counsel. “We remain committed to an open Internet — one that protects real innovation and continues to deliver great products and services.”

The company isn’t throwing its entire patent portfolio up for grabs, however. Quite the opposite: it’s starting small, contributing a mere ten patents to the pledge. Google claims these patents are already in wide use and that it will eventually expand the set of Google-owned patents that fall under the pledge.

Behind the scenes, just about all of the web’s biggest names are mimicking Google. That includes Facebook, Yahoo, eBay, Twitter and so many more.

All of these web giants rely on Hadoop, an open source software platform for crunching data across hundreds or even thousands of computer servers, and Hadoop is based on technology originally developed at Google. A little less than a decade ago, Google published two research papers describing some of the software that juggles data inside its data centers, including a platform called MapReduce, and in short order, a community of software developers — led by Facebook and Yahoo — recreated these tools with open source code.

Expect Google to sue more, but only against companies that sued first. █

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4 Comments

Symbolically this might be an ok thing to do. However, it appears to duplicate what the OIN is already doing. And neither of them are any defense against trolls. The trolls have nothing to counter sue over so there is no help from defensive patents, software or otherwise.

And it is worth adding that, as we’ve seen before, any practising company can arm a patent troll/’enforcer’ to attack a rival with patents. Retaliation in the courts/deterrence is not possible. MPEG-LA, SIsvel, MOSAID, etc.

Needs Sunlight Reply:April 1st, 2013 at 4:42 am

Yes, the real attackers spin off shell companies to attack their opponents. It gets worse, even the trolls spin off shell companies. Knock one down and another one is spun up in east Texas or somewhere similar. That makes it hard to get at the actual source company.

The criminal enterprise known as Microsoft finds itself embarrassingly exposed in the courtroom, for the IRS belatedly (decades too late) targets the company in an effort to tackle massive tax evasions

A look at some of last week's patent news, with imperative responses that criticise corporate exploitation of patents for protectionism (excluding and/or driving away the competition using legal threats)

Vista 10 to bring new ways for spies (and other crackers) to remotely access people's computers and remotely modify the binary files on them (via Windows Update, which for most people cannot be disabled)